Here's my predicament, I'm supposed to do some AE work on an already edited video piece made in FCP. It's HD so I just had the video editor send me the edited piece in a .mov file figuring I could just import that into AE and do my work. But no joy, the file won't play in Quicktime or AE and I can't figure out whether I need a certain codec or if I should have the piece in a different format. He also sent me the pieces rendered in a lower quality H.264.mov but the aspect ratio and quality is too low for anything in AE as they're for preview only.

So my question is, what format would suit my AE needs best?

What will always work is an image sequence. If you need audio, he can render that out too.

I have both Mac and PC and edit in FCP and Premiere and AE but haven't tried exporting a clip from FCP for my PC.

If in doubt, render out an image sequence.